UltraPrime

Actually that's already answered. There's already an order. Toggles on a given tick deduct their end currently. If there's not enough end it suppresses until the next server tick. then it tires to deduct like it normally would. If there's enough endurance, then the effect comes back on.

The beauty is in the simplicity. And since the toggle didn't drop, merely suppressed for a second or so, you're always better off then if it just dropped. Provided that you hear some sort of sound effect alerting you to the fact that you're running low on endurance.

Synopsis:
Change toggles so that instead of dropping when you don't have enough end to run them. When there's no endurance, the toggle is suppressed until you have enough endurance.

Implementation:
Currently toggle's endurance cost is deducted from your endurance pool every certain number of server ticks. If there's not enough endurance to pay for the toggle, it drops. This change would simple suppress the toggle until the next server tick when it tries to deduct endurance again. If you have the endurance, the effect of the toggle would be reapplied. A sound effect that a toggle is suppressed would still be helpful. Not sure if existing sound effect still fits, but that's something that I'd trust the sound guys to figure out

So what do you guys think?

Scrappers can take alphas by running into a group first, but they'll not hold the attention of the mob for long. If you have a taunt aura it helps.

They could put the actual room further underground. That should get rid of all sounds since they would be too far away.

That feature is built in already. However it's on a per user basis. Just turn the volume down

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given the setup of the game, its kind of hard to do flow in missions. In my ever delayed ma mish i tried to have some groups advance the plot, but it was relatively tough to set up, and was possible to miss all of it by playing differently, so yeah, not always easy. would be nice if they could do that without screwing pacing.

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I agree. My missions have filler - boss spawns that have dialog, destructible objects for extra dialog and flavor, that sort of thing. I have not yet been able to come up with a mission that has real flow to it.

I've seen a few and they were sometimes great and sometimes not (re-searching a map for a new glowie that appears after you defeat the boss at the end is annoying).

I do seriously wonder though if people want complex missions. I play CoX over other games because the combat is so much better - but I get bored soloing through a mission if it is just standard spawns. I rarely get bored on a large team doing combat - so much more is going on.

If I just teamed - I would just want missions to have diverse maps and enemies. When I team I don't care about the story - the combat is good enough. And doing a complex mission with a team is more of a pain (click 3 blinkies simultaneously sort of thing).

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This pretty much sums up how I feel about CoX in general. Just about all missions are simple grinds. It's great for teams because it makes grinding fun. In fact, sometimes there isn't enough chaos. But solo, or even duo, it's boring. Sure I'll do a new arc solo once, but other then that it's what is the fastest way to move to the next mish.

You can't. Unless you do this every 5 seconds or 60 seconds. Which will not really defeat it. Depending on how frequently it checks your rate. This isn't something like, oh, in 1 hour you gained all the xp you can have, now you're not allowed anymore.

Looking at methods of leveling, or fixing exploits is putting out the fires.

Adding an xp cap is making the building fire retardant. You still have to worry about the fire, but not to the same degree.

Look at what happened with the EA. If an xp cap was in place people would be farming at the cap. Still a problem, yes, but not to the same degree. The devs would still have to address it, but people wouldn't feel like they just had a huge thing taken away from them. The xp cap is there to lesson the impact of problems. It would also act to curb things that the devs know exist, they don't like it, but there's no real way for them to act on it without affecting regular game play. IE, taking out SKing from the game for instance.

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overall, bad idea. Majority of new subscriptions that I saw came from people knowing they could now level faster. If anything, they need to increase xp gains. I still stand by my suggestion of level up tokens for new players.

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How is it a bad idea if it doesn't affect you? Unless you're PLing sitting on a -5 farm at low levels or using some sort of exploit you wouldn't hit the cap.

I will say why my idea is bad though and the only reason in my mind why the Devs wouldn't implemented. People. Just about all people immediately see it as control taken away from them. They don't go past that part to figured out, oh, this would never affect my unless I was doing something wrong. It's that negative feeling that most people would immediately get that would prevent the devs from putting in this cap. People would be saying, oh, it's ED all over again, and aoe caps, and health caps, City of Caps.

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Look as far as handling missions in AE that can be handled by deleting those that are obviously there for farming and PL'ing.

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That's pretty harsh and should always be a last reward. You're almost certain to lose a customer that way. But if you avoid it in the first place by having the cap in place you're better off.

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Other pl'ing methods are tough to handle. Your system does not handle those that in a sense pl without actually doing just that. I mean that they go the fastest way possible without pl'ing. They would go to the sewers then go the route of TF's and use normal missions when they have too in order to reach the next level of the next TF. I have no doubt that leveling in that manner may exceed the normal limit. So they would be punished for leveling just playing the game normally. Yes there leveling is faster than normal. But that is the fastest that the game gives you unless normally playing AE has become faster.

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Correct, because that's not PLing, that's power gaming. Could it be considered farming or grinding? sure. But that in itself isn't bad. People farm missions all the time when a mission is completed but the story isn't read. You're farming missions. Or grinding on missions. That's is and will be a standard part of most MMOs.

As far as the actual rate, I don't think I can answer what I think it should be. I think the devs with data mining would be better to say what it should be. I can say from a design goal it should allow certain behavior. Specifically if you're fighting +3/+4 on a 8 man team, and you guys are going at a good clip, you shouldn't be affected. If you're -20 from the team, and you ask for the lowest lk so the mobs are +5 to you, should hit the cap. (hopefully that will discourage lowbies from drooling at the chance for easy PL contributing nothing to the team). And of course PLing goes even further then a lowbie taking advantage of a team. So that would be affected always.

Now, if you "farm" with people your own level, where really you're just grinding? well, chances are you won't be hit buy this cap. Because in essence you're not really doing anything different then you would normally. You're just choosing to repeat the same content over and over instead of doing arc missions. Not any diff then running paper missions IMO.

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I'm not a fan of the idea. I'd rather not have more things in the game based on the lowest (or highest) common denominator. There are better ways to curb farming if that's what the devs really want to do.

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This basically hurts PL'ing at it's core. It's physically impossible to level a char faster than X (bugs aside). I don't see any better way of doing it that would be all encompassing. Notice that I didn't say it will stop PLing, or stop farming in general. It will however curb it where the things like AE, and future system that may be added will not have such an impact.

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I see that you have addressed $Inf and Drops, how about Prestige? This being gained the same way and at a comperable rate (whose rate of gain accelerates as XP gain accelerates), this would need to be addressed as well.

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Same deal as the others. Basically if you have xp debt, the idea is that you gained all rewards when you gained the xp. So this would naturally extend to pres.

Quick Clearification.

This effects PLing, rather then griding, not farming in general. Grind farms will still happen. And you can't do much against that since technically you're not gaining horribly more xp. PLing those is a whole different story and this is what the change would affect.

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wow, great idea, so you want it to take even longer for people to level.

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False, with the exception of exploits/bug, this wouldn't come into play.
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Some of us dont have 12 hours a day to sit and play cox.

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Neither do I, and I level just fine without PL'ing/Farming.

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Exactly, through data mining I'm sure the Devs can determine what the xp rate for the most efficient legit team out there is and put that as the cap with a little room to breath. So the average person won't see this. In fact I'm sure PLing will still happen because they'll be at the cap. But it will be harder and for some people it just won't be worth it.

Oh, and the rate should of course take into account xp modifiers (dbl xp weekends, patrol xp, etc)

Why? kill all xp exploits with 1 system. Then you can let people do things that they consider fun while at the same time maintaining risk(time) to reward ratio.

At high level the system would limit the rate at which XP is gained for a character. Since it is a rate, the only way to measure it is over time. In that time there's going to be peaks and valleys. You don't want to penalize a team because a blaster used a nuke so you have to accommodate those peaks.

With all that being said, here's one implementation. Not by any means the only way to do this.
At the time a user zones out of a mission the server looks at the xp gained. If it goes over the cap (whatever it might be) the character is issued xp debt. I figured that would be gentler then taking xp away possibly de-leveling a char. At this point the char has to work off the debt xp before new xp is awarded. While the user has debt xp, he will not gain any inf or drops. Since you gained them before.

In normal scenarios most people will not see this. This would only come up if you found an exploit, or if you have a very low level char sked up to a lvl 50 team.

There was a lot of farming because the auto sk had no counter measures. Specifically when you had a 40 teamed with a 10 fighting 50's. Add to that tailored mobs you get super farms. This is now what we're adding here. In fact, this would limit farms in general more then is done right now. The 46's sking lowbies wouldn't give you 10 dings in a mish. it would give you 1. More or less at the same rate that if you would do low level mish yourself with a team your level.

All the MA farms have shown me an awesome way to find teams. It was incredibly easy to get on, find a team and play. So why can't we have auto sk always in all content? We all know the benefits so I'm not going to focus on those. Instead I'm going to focus on the problems.

First we have the exploitive behavior. Specifically when you have a very low level fighting in a team of high levels he gets xp design for small number of kills. While the high level team will mow down mobs like they were paper. So I think scaling of XP needs to be put in place. On a side note, I think this will cut down on PLing in general. Mainly because be so easy to PL a char from 1 to 20ish.

Another way to address this is to limit how far auto sk works. Say within 10 levels. So everybody will be auto sked to the mission level as long as they're within 10 levels. This works in regular missions but a level would have to be added to the missions in MA's. Maybe base it on leader or highest level member in the team for those. Or just whatever the level that the mission spawns at.

So with potential solutions to make it non exploitive, and with all the team building benefits, what do you guys think?

Agreed with above. If drops become rare price will go up. When the price goes up people will start selling it at WW/BM.

It's my understanding that Dev choice arcs don't get invalidated.

Yup, I second having boards RSS feeds. Especially dev/community digest. Right now I use http://coh.redtomax.com/digest/ for that purpose, but it's not real time. Going directly to the source would be much better.